Thursday, 17 September 2015

Today was great! Juanita (Pt England School) opened my eyes to simplifying my class site and making it 'user-friendly'. I found this very helpful as it tied in with our schools aim to build on community engagement.

When thinkng about our audience, it is our parents. I asked myself questions such as

Can my parent community access this site?

Do they understand how to navigate through it (with or withut their child)?

Have I displayed what is important in our day of learning?

To this I realised that my site was aesthetically pleasing but hard to navigate. So I have since given my class site an complete overhaul. It is now simple and user friendly (tested on my family members). I feel that the home page displays what is important in O'Neill Class. That is , Writing, Reading, Maths, Cyber safety and our class blog etc.

It was also great to think about the importance of our pedagogy around digital learning. You can hand a tool over but without first knowing how to use it, it cannot be used. I think this is something that needs to be stressed to teachers who are new to 1:1 classrooms.